WriteIT, ReadIT, PerformIT What adolescents do!

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In recent months, I published a book about adolescents who let me hang out with them in the waning years of the first decade of this century. For most of these teens, I had done the same thing with their parents two decades earlier and their grandparents more than three decades ago. Teens of the 21st century were a special case.

They laughed at the idea that I was actually writing a book! They argued that I should “just blog” or maybe “tweet,” since “nobody reads books.” Rebecca, one of the young people in the book, pointed out the contradiction that while I was studying young people engaged in every possible way with internet technologies, the very processes I was studying would not be those through which people would get to know about her and her friends. When I told Bernardo, another teen featured in the book, that book publishers would not include photographs (“too expensive”), he asked, “So what’s the point? Everyone needs pictures.” His special interest is organic gardens, chemicals, and water distribution. He relies on the internet to keep in touch with other young people creating community gardens and hoping to own small organic farms someday. Rebecca wants to combine art and science in her future, and the internet keeps her current with what’s happening with other teens who want to go into science while also keeping their hand in the arts.

Today’s aspiring musicians, artists, scientists, pilots, physicians, and entrepreneurs read, write, and perform for, through, and with internet technologies. They make the internet work for them and their interests and passions. They look for performances on YouTube or vimeo. They chase sources and references they hear about, hoping to find “good stuff” that include combinations of written text, photographs, charts, videos, and cross-references to other sites and sources. These teens supplement what they collect through internet sources by talking to their friends, emailing experts, and checking out websites of experts to see where else they can see in action the person, group, product, or program currently at the top of their interest list.

Teens today read, watch, talk, and experiment or perform when they want to know or do something. Their parents, in contrast, watched, talked, and relished trial and error. They read, particularly special-interest magazines, such as Popular Mechanics and Seventeen. Books drew less of their attention, because content quickly became outdated.

In spite of today’s teens’ discouraging words about books, I did publish Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life (2012). As I explained to the young 21st century pioneers, they would very soon be history, and history would, for at least the next few decades, need to be recorded in writing – particularly in books. Within the next decade, what they as today’s teens were doing as they read, wrote, watched, and performed with IT would be outdated. Facebook would evolve or even dwindle as MySpace had done, and new social networking means would emerge with more efficient and effective ways of connecting people, places, actions, and ideas on the internet.
The depressing idea that they and their ways would soon be history made sense to teenagers only when we talked about how toys and play had changed during their short life span. Today their younger siblings have no toys made of wood, dolls without a capacity for action, or pretend phones. Instead, younger siblings played with plastic toys, action figures and vehicles, and real mobile phones and iPads.

Most of today’s teens were quick to admit that they knew little of the work involved in maintaining either the family car or the family home’s electrical system, appliances, heating system, and yard or garden. “Work” for them came in “working out” to stay in shape, getting a job at a fastfood restaurant, or finding a paid summer internship or job. Their parents as teenagers had helped repair the family automobile, knew something about the work needed to maintain the family home, and found employment within the small businesses owned by their parents or friends of their parents.

Indeed across just the two generations represented by them and their parents, work and play, along with ways of talking, regarding written sources of information, and expressing ideas to others had changed right in front of their eyes. Uneasy with being confronted with the speed of change that now makes history, the teens gradually came to relish taking part in the research that went into my book. They digitally recorded their conversations with friends and sessions when friends worked together to create a film or research games on the internet. They learned to count parts of speech, tense changes, and hypotheticals in transcripts of their own talk and to compare these numbers with those from similar recordings their parents had made when they were teenagers. While their parents used past, present, and future tense in their everyday conversations, the teens of today tended to stick with the present tense, making it extend backwards and forwards through vocal emphasis, gesture, and facial expression. Their parents had lacked the fondness for adverbs that today’s teens found in their talk; when they listened to their own recordings, they heard actually, really, totally over and over. While their parents had occasionally used like to introduce a segment of a narrative, today’s teens found this word in their conversations “like everywhere.”

In short, Words at work and play eventually managed to work its way into the hearts and minds of the teens of today who populate the book. When their parents and grandparents read the book, they find much to celebrate about their own youth and more to lament about today’s teenagers. Yet the elders realize that such has for centuries been the pattern of transgenerational assessments. Harder for them to take is the realization that in past decades responses to economic changes lay largely within the control and conscious choice-making of individuals and families. Such is not the case today. The global economy exerts pressures that reach into nearly every aspect of life at the local level. Consumerism, entertainment, and material accumulation have overtaken saving, doing, and knowing. Past values of being spare and frugal, as well as to spending without borrowing have disappeared.

Thus, in spite of protestations from today’s teens, Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life presents their everyday talk and behaviors and those of the two generations before them between the pages of a book. In the words of one teen, this collection of stories is “too big to be on the internet.” Conjoined compliment and complaint, this description fits the book well. The volume’s narrative takes in thirty years of economic changes and ripples in parenting, working, playing, and talking. Families and communities now figure in the lives of children and young people in ways that only faintly resemble those of a decade ago. Learning “on my own” has become the mantra for many of the young today, making them demand that skills and knowledge from school and family socialization be “relevant” and “realistic.” Where this kind of demand comes from and where the innovations that may result will take us constitute the essence of Words at work and play across three decades of family and community life.

An almost story of two books

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Books on certain topics and of particular types seem to come in waves. For a while, it seemed that nearly every new book on the market carried in the title the promise of “seven ways to…”  or “seven steps toward….” More recently, books on ways to beat the stock market or alter the national or global economy include in their titles the phrase of promise  “and how you can….”

Often within a short span of time, we see on best-seller lists several books that treat the same topic. However, certain themes or topics that surround us almost never appear as  the focus of books these days. Take poverty, for example. Though historical fiction pieces and particularly fiction works set in the first half of the 20th century sometimes wind their main characters’ tales within contexts of poverty, non-fiction books that do so appear far less frequently. Yet this year, we have in Katherine Boo’s nonfiction book, Behind the beautful forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity, the gift of a work that takes us into poverty of a type and level that most readers have never imagined could exist. Boo centers the volume in the lives of ordinary people living in a Mumbai slum.  She shows us how global economic ups and downs determine everyday life, neighborly relations, loss of hope for life, and the corrupting influence of an obsession with power.

In the volume, we meet Abdul, the ever-strategizing young trash picker living in Annawadi, a slum located adjacent to the Mumbai airport and its luxury hotels.  We first see and hear Abdul struggling in the dark to hide from the police who are sure to come and charge him with setting on fire One Leg, the cripple who lives just next door.  From this harrowing opening, we go through the book to watch and listen as Sunil, Rahul, and other boys close in age to the innocent Abdul seek work by scavenging the waste thrown from cars, trucks, and pedicabs that travel the airport road. The female counterparts of these young boys spend their days at the slum’s water tap and prepare and cook meals inside the smoke-filled hovels flimsily built of collected brick, stones, corrugated tin, and cardboard.  Parents market themselves and their sly and victimizing schemes whenever and wherever possible.  Women sell their bodies to men outside the slum who circulate through the airport’s many inner communities of police, mechanics, truckers, and food preparers.  Men and women sell schemes to their neighbors or move in to take advantage of a neighbor’s misfortune and offer advice or help in exchange for payment. Some look beyond the slum to local politicians and the nearby police station and wiggle their way into favor by offering to sell information. often misleading, if not entirely false.  The few Muslim residents live ever aware of the animosity of their Hindu neighbors who, in turn, live in the shadow of a caste system discounted by their government while held in memory by anyone wishing to claim power over a member of a lower caste. Envy, suspicion, and distrust feed the imaginations of residents ever on the lookout for ways that maneuvering, gossiping, and denouncing might temporarily advance their position.

Throughout Boo’s compelling book, we hear Abdul speak rarely, but we come to know what he thinks through Boo’s carefully constructed entries into his mind.  Abdul thinks  while he sorts trash.  He contemplates the falling ambitions of a younger boy, analyzes the motivations of Annawadi’s couples, wonders what love could feel like for him, and grieves for a murdered friend whose body is left tossed inside a fence. When Abdul enters the juvenile detention center to the unstoppable beatings there, his thoughts speak less of the pain than of his mental strategies for getting his own mind beyond what is happening at the moment.  He takes from a charlatan “teacher” allowed to enter the detention center a sense of moral code for himself that, added to his own sensitivities to the world, becomes his guiding rationale. Once released, however, he clings to this code fiercely, as he watches the human destructiveness that comes along with the mechanical destruction of the encroaching bulldozers that will clear the slum to make way for hotels and promised housing for the poor.

Katherine Boo and I have never met. Yet when we do, I can imagine that we will easily fall into conversation about how her book came about.  I will want to tell her how much I appreciated the beauty of words that do not show the loving labor of composition that lies behind prose as graceful, vivid, and flowing as hers.  I will rush to tell her my gratitude that someone of her fame and stature is so willing to admit her own need to learn,and  struggles to find young colleagues to work alongside her.  I will especially want to tell her how much I appreciate her sense of realism about just how much and how little such a book can achieve in a world of readers disinclined to want to read about worlds they see as so distant, so foreign, and entirely unrelated to their own.

As we talk, I will also want to tell Katherine Boo about my book,Words at work and play:  Three decades in family and community life.  Though set on the opposite side of the world, this book parallels in several ways the book that Boo has written.  Each of our books relies on taking the chance to be trusted by those who have many reasons not to trust the person they see as an outsider white woman. Each of us goes inside places with families and their children that adults find dangerous and insignificant. Each of us listens and then listens some more, collects documents, talks to outsiders, follows people away from their communities to hospitals, funerals, morgues, detention centers, and into the pursuits children take up on their own time. Each of us has worked along side young scholars who distrust our intentions initially but learn that they are not immune to the need to follow the lives of children where their poverty takes them.

Katherine Boo, as journalist, reporter, and editor recognizes that her book reports not only what she saw, heard in conversations and fact-checking interviews, and read in documentation from multiple sources. She also goes within the heads of those whose lives she came to know so well. Whereas anthropologists generally strive not to report the inner thoughts of the characters in their works, reporters can do this. Katherine Boo admits that she does so, and she tells her readers both why and how she managed to “convey the deep, idiosyncratic intelligences” (p.250) of the individuals living in Annawadi. She reminds her readers that she never mistakes a “sliver” for the “whole.”

Our two books share much by way of intention, process, engagement, and honesty. We both believe deeply that “better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives” (p. 251). Each of us admits to experiencing the fierceness of emotions of those with whom we spent days and days over years. We admit our sense of helplessness in altering the course of lives, while also acknowledging the frustrations that those we studied felt toward us and our “dim-wittedness” (p. 252). Both of us make no significant effort to cover our dissatisfaction with the deceptions of schools,  justice systems, governmental bureaucracy, and commercial media.

Finally, and perhaps a surprising trait we seem to hold in common is our view of what has happened to morality as the global economy reaches farther and farther into every corner of ordinary lives around the world. Boo speaks of the “contraction of our moral universe” (p. 253), while I insist that readers of my book acknowledge the failing ethical strength of parents who blindly put their own needs and goals above the need their children have for boundaries, joint play, explorations in the natural world, and frequent and long conversations centered in caring.

Katherine Boo and I have independently written books that speak to the absence of a center that can hold between those in positions of wealth and power and those living powerless in poverty. What I wish for from these two books is that one or both will encourage more readers to think about capabilities squandered when the world talks incessantly of consumerism, construction, and exploitation of the earth’s resources to fuel the speedup of both. I wish from both books for less talk among political leaders about manufacturing of consumer goods and more talk about innovative approaches to creation of learning environments in which the Abdul’s, Sunil’s, Manju’s and Meena’s of India and the Martha’s, Tony’s, Bernardo’s, and Donna’s of the United States could apply their imaginations and relentless strategizing to the advancement of ideas about what and how to manufacture. I wish most for more attention going to infrastructural support of grassroots opportunities that could then be examined, expanded, and tested so that they could be set down elsewhere in communities of poverty and need.

Reading two or more books at once is a habit of many avid readers. My hope is that some of you out there who do this kind of reading will alternate between Words at work and play and Behind the beautiful forevers. Then think about what they have in common and the characters in each that you cannot get out of your heads.  What book might you write that would build from either of these nonfiction works in leading readers to recognize that “they hold some responsibility now and into the future for the lives of individuals whose stories resemble those told here” (Heath, p. 195)?

Favorites?

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Blog # 3
March 17, 2011
Favorites?
Every novelist and ethnographer who portrays a host of characters faces the question of “who was your favorite?” Certainly, when the writer has lived with the characters for decades, favorites emerge.

In the research behind Words at work and play, from time to time, I favored this or that child, generally because I was especially fascinated by how he or she was learning to use language. When bilingualism became almost the norm among families of the late 1990s, I tended to spend more time with children such as Bernardo, Rebecca, and Mark, who were growing up with two languages than I did with their monolingual counterparts. After Bernardo lost his mother and became alienated from his father, I filled an especially tough role, for I had been very fond of his mother, admired and respected her immensely, and become intellectually bonded with her during our many evenings talking science and art. I knew up close the unique companionship Bernardo felt for his mother.

As the years went by and I monitored the quantitative measures within my charting of key characteristics I kept for each child, I often turned my attention to those children whose patterns were showing striking changes. If a child who had been particularly adventuresome and outgoing in middle childhood became sullen and withdrawn during adolescence, I wrote and phoned more often than usual, and I tried to be around for special events, end-of-term activities, and birthday celebrations. I wanted to know if early childhood features restored themselves, or if these had been only a phase in the child’s maturation.

Once Jerome and I reconnected, we communicated frequently, for until he went to Atlanta the first time, he was filled with curiosity about what his mother and half-siblings might be like. He asked questions incessantly and wanted to see photographs, hear tapes, and look at maps of Georgia and Atlanta.

Martha, along with about a dozen more learners very much like her, drew my attention often. Martha went in and out of any willingness to talk with me, show me her artwork, or let me be with her during her after-school hours. However, she, like many of the young people who did not do well in school, did send me messages, photos, and let me be their “friend’ on Facebook. As Martha (and others) moved from their secondary years of schooling into decisions about career entry, higher education choices, and living arrangements away from home, I became a sounding board for their expressions of rebellion, joy, fear, and despair. The children of the late 1990s soon found out that they had no idea how to shop for groceries, cook a meal and clean up after themselves, or manage laundry, apartment cleaning and maintenance. Those who thought they could conquer the world after their secondary school graduation found themselves having to keep too many balls in the air, and they needed to vent to someone. I was often that someone, for most of them could not face telling a parent that leaving home had not turned out to be the fun freedom they had expected. Decisions surrounding romance, sexual activities, finances, and competition framed many of my conversations with those between 17 and 24 years of age during the first decade of the 21st century.

So the answer to the question of whether or not I have favorites is YES! I have plenty, but who holds a position of favorite at any moment varies often. Now when I read Words at work and play and “see” each character as he or she was when the episodes and communications recounted there took place, I often shiver with the emotions recalled from that particular slice of life. Ethnographers as well as novelists and biographers immerse themselves in the lives of the characters they freeze in time through the written words on the page. These writers do not easily lose the memories associated with the place and atmosphere of words and incidents as they happened in life or as they revealed themselves through archival sources.

So if you ever ask an ethnographer, novelist, or biographer about favorites, prepare yourself for stories to come. Remember that for any character or set of characters, “Neither the whole story nor the true one ever exists, however much we may wish for it. If we could achieve wholeness and absolute truth in our stories, we would have no more stories to tell. And tell stories, we must” (p. 7).

What’s in a story?

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Blog # 2
February 29, 2012

For centuries, parables and stories have stood for more than they tell. We are to learn from them by taking on their morals, comparing their plots with others we know, and projecting ourselves into them as characters, critics, or illustrators.
Words at work and play: Three decades in families and communities is a collection of stories about the intergenerational lives of families first introduced to readers in the 1983 volume, Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. There readers came to know families of Roadville and Trackton and to watch their children go off to newly desegregated schools. Now, in the sequel to that book, readers can see what these children have done with their lives and how they have fared as parents, workers, and citizens on the economic roller coaster that followed the early 1980s.
A question that readers will surely ask as early as chapter 2 of the book is “How did you choose the individual characters featured in the stories?” In Chapter 2, readers meet Jerome, a child that did not grow up in Trackton because his teenage mother gave him over as an infant to her older sister to raise. The sister moved to New York, died when Jerome was quite young, and he entered the foster care system there. I found him, quite by accident, years later in Chicago. Later chapters introduce other children from Roadville and Trackton and follow them across the years (and the geographical expanse of the USA) as they marry, have children, send them off to college, and watch them launch careers unimaginable to those who worked two or three decades earlier in the textile industry and agrarian world of the Piedmont Carolinas.
But why feature the particular characters who inhabit the stories of Word at work and play, readers will persist in asking. All ethnographies prompt readers to suspect that the individuals who star in these works are just that – exceptional sparkling cases. Therefore, from the earliest point of my decision to follow the lives of families as they scattered after textile manufacturing shrank in the Carolinas, I stuck with a consistent plan. To the extent possible, from my own data and those provided by family members, I coded features of each individual as each piece of data came in. Early in the 1980s, I developed a list of twenty-eight characteristics that guided my interpretation of data collected on each individual. By tracking data in this way, I was coming as close as possible to recording with a high level of objectivity how individuals matured across the years and what they took with them in their ways of being as they moved into adulthood. I recorded only what happened; I had no interest in recording what I might have thought should have happened. My goal was to ensure that the ultimate choices of characters emerged primarily from patterns revealed through the data and not from any inclination I had toward my own favorites. I wished to feature neither stars nor failures.
Over the years, it became evident to me that characteristics I coded clustered around three domains of behavior: (1) language and other symbol structuring in social interactional and sociotechnical activities; (2) curiosity, creativity, and manual dexterity in manipulation of tools and materials used in play and work; and (3) personal qualities of memory, self-management, empathy, moral reasoning, and responsiveness and responsibility. When I started in early 2000 to make the choice of individuals to be featured in the book, I winnowed down by statistical means the characters for whom I had the fullest data sets across these three domains. This process involved looking at the totals in each category of coding for each individual and selecting one character from each portion of the full spectrum. Once I did this, I decided that those selected had to reflect not only their standing as individuals but also the kinds of families that emerged over the three decades. Thus the book includes relatively stable families as well as those in which children lived lives of upheaval and chaos.
What does this process mean for the trust that readers can place in the characters’ stories? Central to this trust is not whether or not any one of the characters is “typical.” Instead, trust should come from a sense of familiarity, an “aha” sensation that lingers after the reading. “I know that character; ((s)he’s so much like Tanya down the street.” However, the fact that Tanya resembles an individual in the book does not necessarily indicate that she comes from the same kind of family circumstances that produced the book’s familiar character. Perhaps, but readers should jump to no fast and easy conclusions. As life (and this book) reveals again and again, children from the same family turn out to become quite different adults. Hence any story of an individual is just that: one story about one individual.
From collections of such stories, however, readers and listeners have for centuries taken away details, plots, and finalities with which to build their own sense of meaning. Some of us may turn meaning into morals or lessons, others move to judgment, while some cling to segments of stories as sources of comfort, caution, or provocation. Such is the case with Words at work and play. The book is sure to be controversial, because of this openness to interpretation about how individuals and families negotiate the dramatic turns of economic fortune that have marked the 21st century. These twists and turns have affected predictability for every organization and institution. The upheavals have been particularly felt by entities most involved with children and families and their well-being. Social welfare agencies, medical centers, schools and daycare programs, community centers, museums, and higher education institutions have had no choice but to try to respond thoughtfully and in an informed way to all that the 21st century’s severe economic turns of fortune have brought to housing, nutrition, childrearing, healthcare, and social interactional life within families.
Many details of daily existence within households are not easily seen in the rush of modern living. Most lie outside the full awareness of adults and children, for they just are. “That’s the way it is” has become the mantra of families. In Words at work and play, I have embedded characters in the unseen and seemingly insignificant details of everyday living. In doing so, I have tried to show the interdependence of the penetrating effects of habits of time, space, and communication on responsibility, empathy, and memory.
I am eager to hear from readers on the point of whether or not they see themselves or those they know within the stories of Jerome, Rebecca, Bernardo, and the other young people of the book. Let me know.

Anniversary and a new opening….

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February 22, 2011

On February 22 of 2010, I was visiting Christchurch, New Zealand, when the city and surrounding area experienced a devastating earthquake. When the quake hit, two friends and I were in the great cathedral, the heart of the central downtown area of Christchurch. Sound was the first sensation, followed quickly by the switching back and forth of the large stones of the floor of the cathedral and the sound of falling stones from overhead. The earthquake was shaking the great Doric columns of the structure, crumbling the walls, and blinding us in the dust of the cascading mortar and stones. The cathedral had no pews that might offer protection—only folding chairs with attached kneeling benches. As quickly as possible, we tried to pull the chairs over our heads as protection from the falling debris.
The story ends miraculously for us, for within what seemed an eternity but was in reality less than ten minutes, a beautiful young woman appeared in the central doorway of the cathedral, spotlighted by the brilliant sunlight behind her. We heard a voice calling “Anyone there? Call out quickly, quickly.” Realizing that we had escaped serious injury and could move, we called out. She began to climb over the rubble toward us, all the while imploring us to “Hurry, hurry, you must get out.” Guided by the light from the open doorway, we pushed the debris from us and made our way toward her. She held out her hand to each of us in turn, pulled us up over the piles of stones, and led us out to safety. We never learned her name; we were never able to thank her. We numbly watched as she kept going back into the cathedral to rescue others. She and all Christchurch residents knew there would, in all likelihood, be aftershocks that could be worse than the one we had just experienced. Already the top of the tower and one side of the cathedral had collapsed, and another quake would surely bring down the rest.
I begin this, my first blog, with this story, not only because of this anniversary, but because such a near-death experience reminds anyone that not only is every day (and every rescue) a gift, but also every story stretches out its fingers of meaning to listeners and readers with differing degrees of connection.
My new book, Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life, the sequel to Ways with words (1983/1996) had gone off to the publisher just before I left the US for the hiking and sightseeing trip to New Zealand. This new book tells story after story of the children and grandchildren of the original families of Ways with words. I weave the stories together to tell something of what I learned by following these families through thirty years, as they traveled far from the Piedmont Carolinas where we had first met in the 1970s. The loss of manufacturing and agrarian life, along with the double-dip recession of the early 1980s scattered the families of Roadville and Trackton, first to nearby southern states, and then in the early 1990s, to western states when the IT revolution attracted the children of both communities who had by now completed not only secondary school but also college or university. Their stories became interwoven with the creative revolutions in technology, education, entertainment, child-rearing, and family life taking place as the 21st century opened.
Ironically, Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life (2012), arrived in the United States for distribution on the one-year anniversary of my earthquake rescue. Now finally available (the intervening year had in many ways seemed exceptionally long!), the new book is out there to take on its own life.
In the next two months of blogs, I take up questions that I think readers may logically ask about the book. Readers are also welcome to send me their own questions, and I will respond. Sure to be controversial—even more so than was the case with Ways with words when it was published, this new book raises issues that cannot be explained away with labels or easy explanations. Ways with words gave readers concepts and explanations that related to the dramatic effects of the intersection of cultural histories and social class in the socialization of children, black and white, brought on by the tumultuous changes of the Civil Rights era. This new book does the same for the infinity of small moments of interaction in family and community life brought about by these changes.
Words at work and play picks up the stories of descendant families of Roadville, a white working-class community in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Trackton, a nearby black working-class community in the same period. By the mid-1990s, most of these families saw themselves as mainstream and middle-class. With this change of self-perception of socioeconomic status, what happened to child socialization, family life, and intergenerational communication around work and play over the next three decades? These families vowed to give their children “every opportunity” to succeed in school and to look ahead to lucrative careers. Yet as the new century opened, the influence of new technologies on patterns of space, time, and relationships in families intensified. Explosions of wide-reaching change in socialization erupted within all these families. This book tells the story of where these blasts took children and their parents year after year, as they followed new jobs, created new homes, adopted new habits, and adapted almost unknowingly to remade self-images.
Check this blog again for answers to questions readers are likely to raise as they begin to read Words at work and play. Questions likely to come will ask: “How typical might these families be? What implications follow for parents and teachers from the stories of the descendant families of Roadville and Trackton? Do you see socioeconomic forces as more emphatic and unyielding in their influence on children’s development than factors previously attributed to cultural differences?”